Travelers visiting Boston always get lost in the history of the region. Even a night on the town, enjoying the best of Boston’s famous pubs and nightclubs, there’s a strong sense of the past. That’s one of the truly great appeals of the city, because there is an extremely contemporary urban sensibility here, and taken with the historical consciousness, it becomes a rather magnificently uncanny town to visit. It’s difficult to set foot on any of the bustling streets without wondering what it might have looked like a hundred years ago.

Thanks to the foresight of a number of collectors and historians, and the radical evolution of digital imaging technologies, it’s possible to get the bird’s eye view of Boston in some famous map collections. For the casual visitor looking for a place to eat, there are plenty of resources for Boston maps to help you find your way around, but there are also some bigger treasures.

For someone who has an interest in cartography, even a passing one, this is a place to visit for sure. Not only are there plenty of resources available, but you can also walk the very same roads that you can find on old maps, and might even be able to find your own hotel , or what it used to be in centuries past.

The David Rumsey Map Collection could very easily be among the best in the world. His collection has thousands of maps of North and South America, and there’s a special collection on Boston. Thanks to the innovations of Luna Imaging, the maps have been carefully scanned and made very searchable online, so that it’s possible to look at several city maps side by side, and compare how Boston has changed over time.

Those who still like to have a map in their hands, there’s also the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at Boston Public Library, with a huge collection of world maps as well as maps of New England and Boston.

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